On November 6, 2012, American voters headed to their polling places to determine—for the 57th time in U.S. history—who would be the country’s president for the next four years. Despite the closeness of the race going into the election, President Obama emerged with a clear victory on election night, winning a sizable majority in the electoral college to secure a second term in the White House. The president claimed at least 303 electoral votes to challenger Mitt Romney’s 206 and in the process swept virtually all of the so-called battleground states where the presidential race had been most hotly contested, including Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire, among others. For his part, Romney was able to carry only two of the states that Obama had won in the 2008 election—Indiana and North Carolina. The final margin in the popular vote stood at more than 50 percent for Obama and Vice President Biden to around 48 percent for the Romney-Ryan ticket. In his late-night victory speech in Chicago, Obama thanked voters across the country and proclaimed, “Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back, and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.”

As expected, exit polls conducted on election day showed that voters overwhelmingly cited the ailing economy as their top concern. At the same time, however, voters appeared to recognize that the economy was slowly improving and were willing to give the president more time to address the array of problems confronting the country. As Obama turned his attention toward the next four years, the question in the minds of many observers was just how productive he would be in his second term given that the government remained sharply divided. Although a record-breaking amount of money—an estimated $6 billion—was poured into the election, in the end the balance of power in Congress was relatively unchanged, as Republicans retained solid control of the House of Representatives and Democrats increased their majority slightly by two seats in the Senate.

Obama’s calls for bipartisanship cooperation seemed more urgent than ever. As the election was unfolding, the country was drawing closer to what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had dubbed the “fiscal cliff,” a series of economic measures mandated by law to either expire or be enforced at the turn of the new year. These included the expiration of tax cuts passed during the presidency of George W. Bush, temporary payroll tax cuts initiated by the Obama administration, and some tax breaks for businesses, along with the automatic application of across- the-board spending cuts to military and nonmilitary programs as required by the budget agreement of 2011. There was fear that, absent some compromise, those measures would result in another recession.

Aside from tackling the daunting economic and fiscal issues, another major goal for Obama’s second term was to oversee the continued implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health care reform legislation put into place by his administration. Obama’s reelection alone represented a major step toward ensuring the survival of the sweeping reforms, since Romney had promised to revoke the legislation if he were elected. The historic law would extend health care coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans.

While Obama acknowledged in his victory speech the difficulties that lie ahead, he continued to stress his optimism for the future. His closing lines, in fact, were reminiscent of his stirring keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which had first brought him to the attention of the country at large. “I believe we can seize this future together,” said the newly reelected president, “because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.”